August 8: A Day Of Glory

"One cannot hold back one's emotions easily," she said after she had cooled down a bit. "We want Algeria to win. We want a courageous Algeria. The Algerians will understand this message."

In sending her message, Boulmerka compressed her whole season into one driven race. She would win no more in 1992. But as she took her lap of honor—once covering her streaming eyes with her Hag as if it were a silken green veil—the shouts of the knowing congregation deafened her and wound the nerves of the waiting 1,500-meter men one nauseating notch tighter. Later, Boulmerka's race would seem to have been the moment when the crowd sensed its full power. From then on, this throng would not simply witness and marvel; it would seize and ignite.

But after the hard, clean swiftness of the women's race, it was confounding to see the men begin their 1,500 with slow laps of disorderly jostling. "It looked like one of Spain's national pastimes," Cordner Nelson of Track & Field News would write with asperity. "Milling about."

There was a plot afoot, aimed at world champion Noureddine Morceli, who was the favorite because of his ability to do just what his fellow Algerian Boulmerka had done: kick well off a fast pace. To neutralize him Joseph Chesire of Kenya led at a speed slower than what the women had run, and his Kenyan teammate, David Kibet, stationed himself off Morceli's right elbow, boxing him in. Morceli didn't sense the trap. He patiently waited for an opening.

None came. With a lap to go, eight milers found themselves very fresh and frantically hunting for room to sprint. Kibet stayed where he was, sacrificing his own chance to win in order to keep Morecli locked inside. Spain's Fermín Cacho, for whom the crowd called with yearning but not much hope, was in third but on the rail, scaled there by Chesire and Jens-Peter Herold of Germany. He knew he had to move. He looked distractedly around, seeming on the verge of panic.

Then Chesire, inexplicably and wrongly and astoundingly, edged wide. "It opened," Cacho would say, "like a miracle."

Cacho is not a man to debate whether to accept salvation. Instantly he forced himself inside Chesire and into the lead. The sound from the crowd then was atavistic—a great roar echoing out of an earlier time, a battle rage. Cacho was hurled through the last 100 meters almost as if control of his body had passed to his people and his king. He looked back six times in the homestretch, fearful that his impossible gift might be snatched away, and won by three meters over Rachid El Basir of Morocco and Mohamed Suleiman of Qatar. Cache's face at the line was so wrought with passion that it might have been molded by El Greco.

The man running behind Cacho until just before he made his move was Morceli. Had he waited and followed Cacho through to the stretch, things might have been different. But on the last back-stretch Morceli dropped far back in order to claw his way outside to freedom, and he was never able to threaten. He finished seventh. Now, amid the hysteria for Cacho, the stunned Morceli put his hands to his ears and took refuge in a stadium tunnel.

Morceli is a proud man. Four weeks later, in Rieti, Italy, he would run 1,500 meters in 3:28.86, breaking the seven-year-old world record of Morocco's Saïd Aouita. He was propelled, surely even then, by that unstoppable Olympic cacophony.

Which of course was a sublime serenade to Cacho, who went to the well-guarded box above the homestretch and was embraced by King Juan Carlos and the whole royal family. The king kept asking him how he could keep going in the stretch. "How could I not?" Cacho told him. "It felt easy." His reward, beyond medal and herbs and being forever embossed upon his nation's imagination, will be a $1 million trust fund, which he can start collecting at age 50, when he may have calmed down.